Theseus and the Minotaur

The story of Theseus and the Minotaur is one of the stranger legends of Classical
mythology. But much of the story seems to have a plausible rational explanation,
in principle, if not in detail.

The Legend in brief

In some far distant time (as seen by the Classical Greeks) King Minos ruled
the Aegean. He demanded in tribute every year a group of Athenian youths and
maidens. These were delivered to the Labyrinth, in the middle of which lived
the Minotaur, a terrifying creature that was half human and half bull. Once
anyone entered the Labyrinth, they could never find their way out again; the
Minotaur devoured the youths and maidens as they tried to escape. After many
years of this, a courageous youth called Theseus volunteered to be one of the
group. When Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, saw Theseus, she took a liking
to him, and helped him by giving him a thread that he paid out after him when
he entered the Labyrinth. When Theseus encountered the Minotaur, they fought,
and Theseus killed the beast. After escaping by backtracking along the thread,
he took Ariadne with him as he left Crete. But he did not go straight back to
Athens with her. Instead, he abandoned her on Naxos. Naxos is a large island
in the Cyclades about 200 km north of Crete and the same distance east-south-east
of Athens. That's the usual version, but Homer, in the Odyssey, says
that Ariadne was put into a deep sleep and had to be left on Dia, which is a
very small island just off the coast of Crete opposite Amnisos, which was the
port of Knossos.

Some probable facts

There are two threads of probable facts that seem to me likely to underly this
strange legend. One is the relationship between Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete,
and the other is the influence of earlier civilizations in Mesopotamia and the
Levant (modern Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria), or even earlier, in Anatolia.

Until the explosion of Thera (Santorini) in 1650 BC (discussed in the
page about the Atlantis legend), the Minoans controlled the sea trade, and
were a dominant cultural influence in the whole Aegean area. They had a refined
artistic tradition, and a complex society that seems to have had a rather low
priority on soldiering, as compared to other cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean.
After the explosion, the administration of Crete seems to have become Mycenean
Greek, as attested by the transition of the writing from Linear A (in an unknown
language) to Linear B (Early Greek, though some of the symbols come from Linear
A), as well as by other administrative and cultural changes deduced from the
archaeological record. It is quite possible that Mycenean Greeks might have
been a little jealous of the power, the artistry, and the extraordinary craftsmanship
of the Minoans before the explosion, whereas afterwards, it was the Greeks who
were in control.

The Labyrinth

Pre-explosion Crete contained several large "labyrinthine" palaces
(or perhaps temples--or both). "Labyrinth" means a complex in which
it is easy to get lost in a maze of passages, and at least the temple-palace
at Knossos would have readily qualified, and in Mycenean times, the name
"Labyrinth" was applied specifically to that building. But the word
may also be related to "Labrys" the double-bladed axe that was as
much a religious symbol in Minoan Crete as the Cross is in Christian countries.
"Labyrinth" applies specifically and specially to Knossos, but it
might almost as readily have applied to Malia or Phaestos. I mention Malia particularly,
because, as we observed, symbols based on the "labrys" were very common
among the Mason's
Marks seen there.

Bull leaping team. A fresco found at Knossos.

Bulls were at the centre of religious life in Minoan Crete (as indeed they
had been in Mesopotamia in the preceding three thousand years). If the frescos
at Knossos represent anything close to the reality of life there, the Minoan
youth practiced a variant of the bull-fight in which the risk to the bull was
negligible, but the risk to the human was considerable. One does not have to
see the bull-leaping image as representing a static "photographic"
representation in order to believe that some kind of athletic gymnastics was
attempted with a charging bull. It may have been a religious rite as much as
an athletic contest or demonstration.

It is thought that there were special religious games in which the bulls featured
prominently. Such games, if they were held annually or even once every few years,
might have drawn the youth from a wide region to Knossos, as the quadrennial
Olympic Games did in Greece more than a thousand years later. If some of those
youths came from Athens, they were indeed being delivered to the Labyrinth.

The Minotaur figure

The second thread of probable fact comes from Mesopotamia, meaning Sumer. related
states and regions from around 5000 BC up to the time of Minoan Crete. City-states
such as Ur, Eridu, Uruk, Ashur, Ebla, and Byblos are relevant, to mention only
a few cities that were culturally linked at some time between 3500 and 1500
BC.

Part of a Sumerian seal from about 2000 BC. Rohl ,1998 inteprets the
bull-man as Gilgamesh (Rohl,p170), but the bull-man image goes back to much
earlier times.

There are certain hints that the Minoan civilization might have been influenced
by, or even descended from, the Sumerian / Mesopotamian civilization of a thousand
years earlier. According to David
Rohl (Legend: The Genesis of Civilisation, London, Arrow Books 1998), the
Phoenecians and Canaanites who inhabited the coast of what is now Israel and
Lebanon came from Sumeria (Ur, Uruk, Eridu) at the same time as others from
the same region went to Bahrain and then to the Upper Nile, some time around
3000BC. If the Minoan culture was actually derived from the Sumerian, as seems
not unlikely, it must have happened before writing became common in Sumer, around
3000 BC. Rohl's dates tend to be more recent than the conventional dates, so
when Rohl mentions 3000 BC, he refers to a time conventionally dated rather
earlier, perhaps 3500 BC.

I consider more closely here the notion that the
Minoan culture owed a great deal to that of pre-literate Sumer, or perhaps
even descended from it, and that contacts were maintained with the Levantine
coast, which was often part of Mesopotamian empires over the years. Sumer almost
always had trading relations as far afield as Anatolia and India, even as far
back as 4000 BC. It is therefore not unreasonable for the Classical Greeks to
have attributed to Minoan Crete elements that their Mycenean ancestors had known
from sea traders who came not from Crete, but from the Levant. In particular,
the half-man half-bull image was common in Mesopotamia for at least two or three
thousand years before the destruction of the Labyrinth.

What the Greeks knew

It seems clear that the Labyrinth was known to the Mycenean Greeks, and probably
the bull-man icon of the Minotaur was, too. It is also likely that the Myceneans
would have known about the bull games. Maybe the bull games included bull-riding,
as in a modern rodeo. If we remember that the natives of Central and South America
thought Spaniards on horseback were a horse-man hybrid animal, it is not inconceivable
that some Athenian visitor seeing bull-riding for the first time might have
imagined the duo to be a hybrid monster. This notion is possible, but it is
not likely, given that the Minoans traded all through the Aegean. More probably,
the Athenians would have regularly sent delegations of youths to the games,
from which some might not have returned either because of fatal mishap or because
they chose to stay in the excitingly rich Minoan state, as did some Soviet athletes
who visited the richer Western countries during the Cold War.

Classical Greece began perhaps a thousand years later, after a period known
as the "Greek Dark Ages," when the glory of Minoan Crete was a distant
memory. There was little or no writing in Greek during the Dark Ages, and we
have no records of any written history. Some oral history may have come down
through bardic traditions from the Mycenean times to Classical times in Greece.
It is quite normal for such oral traditions to personalise events, by attributing
to a hero the affairs of a people. The downfall of Crete and the takeover of
Greek administration might easily be personified as the overthrow of the Minotaur
by a Greek hero.

The name "Theseus" has been found on two Linear B tablets (necessarily
of Mycenean time), identified as "Servant of the God" (Silver).
So the legendary Thesues may have been based on a real individual, perhaps one
of the first to visit Crete after the Theran catastrophe. According to the Larousse
Encyclopeadia of World Mythology, and also according to Bullfinch, the heroic
Theseus actually existed. He was a leader of Athens, and was able to bring together
the city-states of Attica into an Athenian state. According to Larousse, this
would have been shortly before the end of the Mycenian era, which actually was
about 400 years after the explosion of Thera. However, his reputation might
well have survived the Greek Dark Ages through the medium of bardic tales, and
been attached to the Minotaur legend in the same anachronistic
manner as some elements of Homer's Iliad.

This same Thesues was said to have been one of the Argonauts who sailed with
Jason on the quest for the Golden Fleece. If that story were also based
on a real voyage a generation or so before the Trojan War, the date of the real
Theseus would tie it in with my proposal about the underlying causes
of the War, which I hypothesize to be interference with Mycenean Black Sea
trade by the Trojans, whose city lies at the entrnace to the Dardanelles. However,
one element of the Jason story puts the Argonauts at sea very close to the Theran
explosion 400 years earlier, which argues that if that Theseus existed and was
on that voyage, he could also have led a relief expedition to Knossos. Then
again, since this is all complete speculation, maybe the Theseus of Athenian
unification lived 400 years earlier than Larousse indicates, and, like so many
of the legends, the Jason story is an amalgam of tales of different age melded
into a single epic.

Possible interpretation of the Minotaur Legend

The legend has three parts:

the regular "tribute" of Athenian youth to the terrible Minotaur,

the advent of Theseus and his overthrow of the Minotaur with Ariadne's
help, and

the flight of Theseus with Ariadne and his strange abandonment of her on
Naxosor Dia.

I conjecture that these three elements, woven into a single story, represent
quite disparate but related elements of Mycenean-Minoan relations.

The "tribute" represents two things:(1) the dominance of the Minoans
on the sea, and the relative subservience of the Athenians in matters of international
trade, and (2) the actual regular departure of a shipload of Athenian youth
bound for the Labyrinth, from which some might never return. If this annual
(or biennial or quadrennial) shipload of Athenian youth actually occurred,
the ship would probably have been Minoan. This dominance of the Minoans could
easily have fuelled some resentment, if not fear, which could easily be transmuted
in the bardic tradition into a personification of a fearsome monster. The
shape of this monster would be dictated both by the religious partnership
of man and bull, and by the previous existence of the man-bull iconography.
It is no stretch to suggest that the youth going to compete in the Games became
in the story a tribute to the monster Minotaur.

Theseus (The Servant of the Gods) destroyed the Minotaur--the power of Minos--with
the help of Ariadne, the daughter of Minos. What may have happened was that
the Theran explosion (the act of Poseidon) damaged or destroyed the Minoan
palaces, including the Labyrinth at Knossos. It certainly destroyed the agriculture
over the Eastern half of Crete, for many years, because of the ashfall. The
civil administration must have been destroyed, and the Myceneans were able
to impose their administration, either as a friendly gesture of disaster relief,
or as an unfriendly occupation. The reference to the help of Ariadne suggests
the possibility that at least some Cretans welcomed Mycenean aid, even though
it cost them their independence. There may even have been a real Theseus leading
the initial Mycenean investigative force, despatched when the Minoan ships
stopped coming, though it seems more likely that the name of the later Theseus
was attached to the legend during the intervening millenium before the story
was written down..

Ariadne may represent Minoan culture.

Possibly an outpost of it survived on Naxos for a period after it had
been essentially lost elsewhere. I have no idea whether this notion is
archeologically plausible, but it would fit this symbolic interpretation
of the legend. Theseus (the Mycenean rescue power) aided Ariadne (the
Minoan culture) to live for a while on Naxos. Although taken as a human
story, Ariadne's abandonment makes little sense, taken as an allegory
for whole cultures, it would have been quite impossible for Theseus to
take Ariadne to Athens, whereas taking her to Naxos, where Minoan culture
might have been already established, is plausible. Refugees from Crete
seem to have gone to various other places in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Some, for example, are thought to have been the Philistines against whom
the Israelites waged a war of conquest.

On the other hand, Homer's version is the oldest written version, and
it has two components: Ariadne was put to sleep rather than simply abandoned,
and this happened on Dia, very near Knossos. If we again treat Ariadne
as a metaphor for Minoan civilization, it makes sense, since the Minoan
culture did not die at the time of the explosion. Under Mycenean administration,
it recovered on Crete and was administered from Knossos, which was the
only one of the major palaces to be rebuilt.